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Treasures That Sprang From Rustic Necessity

LONDON — There is the leg of an Ancient Egyptian throne, an ornate 1730s cabinet thought to have belonged to the satirist Jonathan Swift and early 20th-century gems by Eileen Gray and Marcel Breuer, but one of the most intriguing treasures in the new Furniture Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum is a simple wooden and straw chair with rather humbler origins.

It is one of the Orkney chairs, which were designed and made in the late 1800s and early 1900s by David Kirkness, an unusually skillful and enterprising joiner working on the remote Orkney Islands near the northern tip of Scotland. By refining the design of the seating that local farmers and fishermen had made for centuries, Kirkness sold thousands of chairs all over the world, to royalty, politicians and artists, like Augustus John, who once owned the chair now displayed at the V&A.

Ingenious though Kirkness was, his chairs might not have become so popular without the help of an eccentric local philanthropist and champion of Scottish craftsmanship, George Hunter MacThomas Thoms. Together, they turned something that had sprung from poverty into a sought-after artifact steeped in the romanticism of rustic life and the desolate beauty of the Orkney Islands.

Design history is rich with examples of useful, occasionally indispensable objects made by unknown designers using whichever tools and materials happened to be available. The original Orkney chairs are typical, having been made by the poorest inhabitants of an archipelago of some 70 chilly, windy islands at the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea.

So few trees survive there that, for centuries, the Orcadians (as the islanders are called) had to make furniture from driftwood and the straw left over from growing oats to feed themselves and their livestock. The straw was secured with a tough grass that they twisted into string. Some of the chairs had high, rounded woven straw backs, which shielded their occupants from icy draughts, often with wooden drawers tucked beneath the seats to store knitting, tobacco or whisky.

Most Orcadians had no choice but to make their own chairs, but the more affluent islanders bought them from local craftsmen like Kirkness, whose father and grandfather were also joiners. During the 1870s, he opened a workshop in Kirkwall, the largest town on the Orkney Islands, initially running it with his brother William. They made a range of wooden objects there, including coffins: Like many joiners of that era, they doubled as undertakers. But by the 1880s Kirkness was recognized for his skill at making traditional chairs.

Photo

A hooded Orkney chair designed by David Kirkness and thought to have been made by him in the 1890s.Credit
V&A Images

Among his customers was the ebullient Thoms, whose official role was sheriff of Orkney, Caithness and Zetland. Having bought one chair from Kirkness, he ordered another in early 1890, explaining that he planned to display them both at a forthcoming exhibition of Scottish goods in Edinburgh. The design historian Annette Carruthers has traced their relationship through their correspondence. After some bickering over whether the new chair should have a drawer (Kirkness wanted one, but Thoms didn’t), it was dispatched to Edinburgh. In June 1890, Kirkness received a letter from Thoms congratulating him on “a rare piece of good fortune” when a large order arrived from Liberty, a London department store popular with the then-fashionable Arts and Crafts movement.

More orders followed, and Kirkness increased production. He imported wood, mostly oak and pine, from Aberdeen for the frames, but continued to use locally grown straw and grass. The wooden components were made in his workshop, and the straw backs woven by outworkers spread across the islands, some of whom worked for him at night after finishing their day jobs on the land or out at sea. Even so, Kirkness often struggled to meet the demand for his chairs.

By the late 1890s, he had found a solution by devising four design templates, each for a different style of chair: a large hooded one with a drawer; two slightly smaller chairs with optional drawers, one for men, the other for women; and a child’s chair. By standardizing the designs, Kirkness simplified the production process, thereby speeding it up and improving quality control.

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His design strategy was identical to that of the late 19th-century industrialists who were manufacturing thousands of identical objects in their factories, but few of his customers knew that. At a turbulent time when people were nostalgic about disappearing rustic rituals, the idea of traditionally styled furniture made by local people using authentic materials and techniques in so remote a place as the Orkney Islands seemed alluringly romantic.

Sentimentality aside, Kirkness’s chairs were impressive in other respects. “The shape is unusual, as is the combination of materials,” said Christopher Wilk, keeper of furniture, textiles and fashion at the V&A. “Similar chairs appeared in other Scottish islands, but because of Kirkness’s designs they came to be closely associated with Orkney. His chairs aren’t too polished, and have the honesty of objects made simply by hand. You can see the screws holding the wooden parts together and the way the straw was woven and sewn on to the frames. That’s very appealing.”

So appealing that, by Kirkness’s death in 1936, he had produced some 14,000 Orkney chairs. His business survived him only to close during World War II before being revived in 1956 by Reynold Eunson, who bought the workshop and its contents, including Kirkness’s design templates, and rehired some of his employees.

Similar chairs are still made in workshops throughout the Orkney Islands today, and Kirkness’s own chairs are greatly prized by collectors. The V&A had long wanted to acquire one for its collection, but was deterred by the profusion of fake “Kirknesses.”

“He put paper labels on his chairs, and didn’t glue them on very well,” said Mr. Wilk. “But last year, a pair of Kirkness chairs from Augustus John’s studio came up for auction, and we bought them. In one of the drawers, there was a book about Scottish folk songs. Wonderful. You could see exactly why John had bought that chair.”